I'm a past master at:
- Flogging dead horses
- Wasting my breath
- Treating opposition with repetition
- Meddling with strife that does not belong to me
- Being with angry people and complaining they're angry
- Being with reproachful people and complaining they're reproachful
... and other time-consuming activities.
These are obviously all stupid things to do.
Whenever I'm doing something stupid, the reason may not be stupidity.
It may be a concealed prize I do not want to give up.
Unless I admit and yield the prize, the stupidity will continue.
Al-Anon in particular is my venue for this:
Of all the people in the world to entangle myself with, I entangle myself with alcoholics, and then complain that they drink and take drugs, are deceitful, elusive, and mercurial, and feel very hard done-by and ill-used.
I then, quite rightly, go to Al-Anon and discover rooms full of people with the same difficulty, and many of us appear to have the same blind spot.
So we all talk about the difficult emotions we're learning to handle associated with interacting with such difficult people.
It took a long time for me to realise that a lot of people never develop relationships or friendships with the alcoholic or otherwise disordered.
I used to think such people were self-evidently boring.
What is boring is excitement and strife.
That's boring.
What's interesting, today, is what is revealed when I give up strife.